War Of Honor

feet to their proper place on the decksole, and allowed his chair to come back upright. Speaking of Dr. Kare ...

The door—it was much too splendid to be called a 'hatch,' even here aboard Hephaestus —opened exactly on schedule. That was not, Reynaud knew, the fault of Dr. Jordin Kare, who seldom got anywhere on schedule. Trixie Hammitt, Reynaud's secretary, on the other hand, was obsessively punctual enough to compensate for an entire regiment of Kares.

The admiral stood behind his desk, smiling and holding out his hand, as Trixie shepherded in the man whose work was at the core of the grandiosely titled Royal Manticoran Astrophysics Investigation Agency's current endeavors. Kare was a man of medium height, with thinning brownish hair and eyes which couldn't seem to make up their mind whether they were gray or blue. He was a good fifteen centimeters shorter than Trixie, and Reynaud's tall, red-haired secretary's compulsively fussy and overabundant energy seemed to bemuse the distinguished astrophysicist. Which was fair enough. It not only bemused Reynaud, it often intimidated him, as well.

'Dr. Kare is here, Sir,' she announced with crisp authority, and Reynaud nodded.

'So I see,' he observed mildly, and a glint of humor showed in his visitor's eyes as Kare gripped the admiral's hand and shook it firmly. 'Could you see about ordering us some refreshments, Trixie?' Reynaud asked.

Hammitt gave him a hard, pointed look, as if to remind him that her duties were clerical, not catering. But then she nodded and withdrew, and he exhaled a deep sigh of relief.

'I don't think we're going to be able to get rid of her that easily much longer,' he observed to Kare.

'We're both intelligent, highly motivated men,' the physicist replied with a grin. 'I'm sure that, given the alternative, between the two of us we'll be able to think of some way to . . . divert her.'

'I should be ashamed of myself,' Reynaud admitted. 'I've never had a secretary or an assistant who worked harder or longer hours. I know that, and inside somewhere I appreciate it enormously. But the way she fusses over our meetings drives me stark, staring mad.'

'She's only doing her job . . . I think,' Kare responded. 'Of course, the other possibility that occurred to me is that she's secretly in the pay of one of the Star Kingdom's commercial rivals and that her assignment is to permanently derail the project by pushing its directors over the edge.'

'You're being paranoid again, Jordin,' Reynaud scolded.

'Not paranoid, just harried,' Kare corrected.

'Yeah, right.' Reynaud snorted, and waved for his guest to be seated.

It was part of his ambiguous feelings about the entire project that he liked Jordin Kare as much as he did. Of course, the professor was a very likable human being, in his own, absentminded sort of way. He was also one of the more brilliant astrophysicists the Star Kingdom had produced, with at least five academic degrees Reynaud knew about. He suspected there were probably at least two or three others Kare had forgotten to mention to anyone. It was the sort of thing he would have done.

And much as Reynaud hated to admit it, in choosing him to head the scientific side of the RMAIA when they split the agency off from Astro Control, the High Ridge Government had found exactly the right man for the job. Now if they'd only get out of his way and let him get on with it.

'And what wondrous new discoveries do you have for me today, Jordin?' the admiral inquired.

'Actually,' Kare said, 'there may really be something to report this time.'

His smile had vanished, and Reynaud leaned forward in his chair as the physicist's unexpectedly serious tone registered.

'There may?'

'It's too early to be certain, and I hope to God I can keep the bureaucrats out from underfoot while we follow up on it, but I think we may actually be about to crack the locus on the seventh terminus.'

'You're joking!'

'No, I'm not.' Kare shook his head vigorously. 'The numbers are very preliminary, Mike, and we're still a huge distance from nailing down a definitive volume. Even after we do that, of course, we're going to be looking at the better part of a solid T-year, more probably two or three of them, before we get any farther than this end of the string. But unless I'm very mistaken, we've finally correlated enough sensor data to positively state that there actually is a seventh terminus to the Junction.'

'My God,' Reynaud said quietly. He leaned back once more and shook his head. 'I hope you won't take this the wrong way, Jordin, but I never really expected us to find it. It just seemed so unlikely after all these years.'

'It's been a bear,' Kare agreed, 'and I can see at least half a dozen monographs coming out of the hunt for it—probably more. You know the original theoretical math was always highly ambiguous, and it's only been in the last fifteen or twenty T-years that we've had Warshawskies sensitive enough to collect the observational data we needed to confirm it. And we've pushed the boundaries of wormhole theory further than anyone else has done in at least a century, in the process. But it's out there, and for the first time, I'm completely confident we're going to find it.'

'Have you mentioned this to anyone else?' Reynaud asked.

'Hardly!' Kare snorted harshly. 'After the way those publicity flack idiots went running to the media the last time around?'

'They were just a mite premature,' Reynaud conceded.

'A 'mite'?' Kare stared at him incredulously. 'They had me sounding like some egotistical, self-seeking crank ready to proclaim he'd discovered the Secrets of the Universe! It took me almost a full T-year to get the record straightened out, and half the delegates to last year's Astrophysics Conference at the Royal Society still seemed to think I was the one who'd written those asinine press releases!'

Reynaud started to say something else, then changed his mind. He could hardly tell Kare he was wrong when he was convinced the physicist was exactly right. That was the main reason Reynaud objected so strenuously to the government's involvement in RMAIA. The work itself was important, even vital, and the funding level required for the dozen or so research ships, not to mention the lab and computer time, certainly left it with a price tag very few private concerns could have afforded. But the entire thing was one huge PR opportunity as far as the current Government was concerned. That was the entire reason they'd created the agency in the first place instead of simply increasing the funding for the Astro Control's Survey Command, which had been quietly pursuing the same research for decades. The RMAIA had been launched with huge fanfare as one of the 'long overdue peaceful initiatives' which had been delayed by the war against Haven, but the reality was just a little different from the shiny facade the Government worked so hard to project.

Nothing could have made the calculating reality behind the 'peaceful initiative' more obvious than the blatant way the politicos scrambled to make political capital off of the work of the project's scientific staff. Official spokespeople who 'forgot' to clear their copy with Kare or Reynaud were bad enough, but at least they could be thumped on for their sins. The project's political overlords, like High Ridge and Lady Descroix, were another matter entirely, and they were the ones who'd really infuriated Kare.

'I agree that we need to keep a lid on this until we have something definite to report,' the admiral said after a moment. 'I'm guessing that you told your staff people to keep their mouths shut?'

'On the research side, yes,' Kare agreed. 'The problem is going to come on the funding and administrative side.'

Reynaud nodded. The scientists assigned to the project shared Kare's opinions about the PR people almost unanimously. Some of them might even have put it a little stronger than the professor did, in fact. But RMAIA was also awash in paperwork, which was the other main reason Reynaud felt the government would have been better advised to let someone else run it. It had been bad enough in Astro Control, which for all its military rank structure was actually a civil service organization. RMAIA was even worse. Not only did government bureaucrats with perhaps three percent of Dr. Kare's credentials and half that much of his intelligence insist on trying to 'direct' his efforts, but they also insisted on exercising a degree of oversight which Reynaud privately estimated had probably doubled the project's time requirements. People who ought to have been attending to research were spending at least fifty percent of their time filling out endless forms, writing and reading memos, and attending administrative conferences that had damn all to do with finding the termini of wormhole junctions. Almost as bad, the project managers were not only scientific ignoramuses; they were also political appointees whose first loyalty was to the politicians who'd given them their prestigious, well-paid jobs. Like Dame Melina Makris, the Exchequer's personal